Computational Photography

Ashok Kandimalla has been in the photographic field for over three decades and has extensive experience in both film and digital photography. Being an electronics engineer by profession and a photographer, he possesses a unique and deep insight into the technical aspects of digital photography and equipment. He has published more than a 100 articles on photography and some of his writings have also been published in the well-known international magazine Popular Photography. An avid collector of photographic books and vintage cameras, Ashok has a keen interest in the history of photography and a passion for sharing his knowledge on photography through teaching and writing. He is the only Indian photographer to be featured on the Nikon Centenary website. He is presently working as a Management and Engineering consutant. He can be reached at [e-mail].

- Ashok Kandimalla

Most serious photographers take a dim view of photography with a smartphone. Or at least used to, till now. The reasons being, small sensors in smartphones resulted in noisy images, poor dynamic range, not enough pixels and so on.

That has changed. These days you can, with a sophisticated smartphone get a perfectly exposed image of an extremely high contrast scene which would be challenging to a full-frame ILC (an Interchangeable Lens Camera that is, a D-SLR or a mirrorless camera). Or you can take a handheld photograph of a low light scene with beautiful colours and little noise. Today, images taken with smartphones are good enough to grace the covers of the most prestigious magazines, appear on billboards, etc.

How did this change come about? You know that the physics behind imaging has not changed. The reason is the way the data is being captured and processed by the computers inside your smartphone running increasingly sophisticated software to get images that would be considered incredible just a few years ago. Since all the magic is happening because of computers and the software running on them, the two words that aptly describe this magic are ‘Computational Photography’. Currently, this technology is mainly with smartphones equipped with cameras but likely and hopefully will migrate to all cameras.

While there is no rigid definition on what Computational Photography